The US Budget Deficit for Fiscal 2016 is about to close, and various estimates bracket a $600 Billion Deficit. I’ve seen numerous analyses which forecast this to rise to over $1 Trillion over the next few years, largely due to the growth of Social Security, Medicare, & other Health outlays, which currently make up about 2/3 of total federal government outlays.

Here is a wealth of numbers from the Office of the President. (I copied below only a tiny amount because the many graphs didn’t copy well.)

2016 United States Budget Estimate

GDP: $16.5T

Total Receipts: $3.34T

Total Outlays: $3.95T

Total Surplus or Deficit as Percentage of GDP:-3.3%

* Note: To the extent feasible, the data have been adjusted using chained 2009 GDP to provide consistency with the 2015 Budget and to provide comparability over time.

For 16 years, in a scene out of pre-industrial America, Thabo Molubi and his partner made furniture in South Africa’s outback, known locally as the “veld.” Lacking even a stream to turn a water wheel and machinery, they depended solely on hand and foot power. But then an electrical line reached the area.

The two installed lights, and power saws and drills. Their productivity increased fourfold. They hired local workers to make, sell and ship more tables and chairs, of better quality, at higher prices, to local and far away customers. Workers had more money to spend, thereby benefitting still more families.

What is little appreciated today is that the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act in 1978 assisted in “birthing” Financial Repression and placing us firmly on the Monetary policy path the Federal Reserve is presently imprisoned by.

Deep State planners fully understood then that employment would become an increasingly larger problem in America and within the developed nations as leveraged buyouts with immediate “downsizing”, “rightsizing” and “outsourcing” were beginning to dominate the financial engineering game of the day.

Driven by the political concerns in the late 1970s about rising unemployment, the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation in 1978 fundamentally compelled the U.S. central bank to drive interest rates progressively lower (see chart below).

The global securities market got a surprise recently when US core consumer price inflation crept up to 2.3% year over year in the month of August. This closely followed core measure, which strips out the more volatile food and energy costs, increased 0.3%; this was the biggest rise in core CPI since February.

According to the government, while the costs associated with food and energy decreased, price increases came primarily from medical care commodities and medical care services. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the prices for medicine, doctor appointments, and health insurance rose the most since 1984.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that consumers will have any relief from the rising cost of health care. According to Freedom Partners the average state increase for health insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act was 15.1% from 2015, as the promised premium reductions from Obamacare circles the drain.

The rise in health care costs stands as another glaring example of the negative consequence of supplanting free-markets with government control. Demonstrating once again how flawed Keynesian economic policies inevitably lead to stagflation.

Productivity and economic growth continue to surprise on the downside in most countries. While there is a great deal of handwringing over the so-called productivity puzzle, little attention is given to the real elixir: freer markets and more competition. Indeed, the policy tide is moving in the opposite direction in most places.

To get a grip on the productivity puzzle, let’s lift a page from the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who once said, “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Yes. There is nothing better than a hard look at empirical evidence to see if it supports those who espouse freer markets or those who embrace the regulatory state as models to enhance our prosperity and health.

(September 26, 2016) It’s early Monday morning, on what could not only be a historically bad week for global financial markets, but the “beginning of the end” of the manipulated worldwide perception that “everything’s OK.” Most of the world’s 7.4 billion denizens know this already, having watched their savings, currencies, standards of living, and political and/or social stability decline substantially since the 2008 financial crisis. Which also goes for the majority of Westerners, I might add. However, Western “intervention operatives” – like the PPT, ESF, Fed, and gold Cartel – have been more successful at manipulating markets to defer such perception. Moreover, having the world’s reserve currency enables the inflationary hell the vast majority are experiencing; and in some cases, like Venezuela, hyperinflation; to be temporarily averted, in lieu of a more gradual, “frog-in-a-pot” type syndrome. This is why gold, in the “average currency,” is trading at, near, or in many cases well above previous all-time highs. Which of course the “evil Troika” of Washington, Wall Street, and the MSM won’t dare discussing, in their cumulative desperation to have you believe the PPT-supported, “record-high” Dow Jones Propaganda Average is indicative of a stability that simply does not exist.

A new study from USGS by Keven Gallo and George Xian verifies what we’ve already learned and published on via the Surface Stations project; that concrete and asphalt (aka impervious surfaces) have increased near weather stations that are used to monitor climate. In this case, it is the much studied USHCN, that climate network I presented a poster on at AGU 2015. Details here.

What is most important about this paper is that it quantifies the percentage of stations that have had increased amounts of impervious surface area getting closer to the stations. As I have long since maintained, such things act as heat sinks, which increase the night-time temperature when they released the stored energy from the sun that was absorbed during the day as infrared, warming the air near the thermometer, and thus biasing the minimum temperature upwards.